Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him by Joe Henry, David Henry Read Free Book Online

ashore during the first World War. Many of the Crescent City’s girls, madams, and pimps went north in search of greener pastures, resulting in a sudden proliferation of brothels in river towns such as Memphis, St. Louis, and yes, Peoria, where officials found it was easier to control prostitution than to stamp it out. Thus it could be said that Richard’s grandmother came by her profession honestly.

BACKING UP WHILE SWIMMING

    As it turned out, Richard’s salvation came in the person of Miss Juliette Whittaker.
    A native of Houston, Texas, Miss Whittaker took a job as director of Peoria’s Youth Theater Guild at the Carver Community Center in the late 1940s soon after graduating with a degree in drama from the University of Iowa.
    The first time Richard showed up at the community center, they were in the midst of rehearsing a play based on the fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin. All the parts had been cast, but Richard was so eager and insistent, Miss Whittaker gave him a role as a servant. He was a “skinny little kid” in his midteens, she remembered, although “he looked about nine.”
    One day, the boy playing the king was absent and Richard begged her to let him fill in. He knew the king’s lines. He knew everyone’s lines. “The other kids just broke up, he was so funny. When the original king retuned, even he had to admit that Richard was better in the part.
    “So Richard stayed on the throne,” she was fond of saying, “and he hasn’t come down since.”
    After that, he won the title role in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (set to the music of Bizet), and played the lead in The Vanishing Pearl.
    “You know that label they use now—hyperactive? Well, they didn’t have that label then. . . . He had a quick mind, was very good with puns. He could see the biting satire in things people would say. He could take your words, twist them, and throw them back at you. And this used to make the other kids very angry because they weren’t used to fighting with words.”
    Miss Whittaker suspected that Richard hid his talent from the menfolk in his family. “It wasn’t quite masculine.” Not that his father or uncle had any problem with stage performers. Their world was populated with musicians and comics and female dancers. Buck had done a little vaudeville singing himself. Drama, though, was for sissies. “Nobody from the family, as I recall, would ever come to the plays,” Miss Whittaker told biographer Jim Haskins. “They didn’t take it seriously.”
    After observing Richard tell jokes to entertain the kids building sets for one of her plays, Miss Whittaker asked him to be the official host and emcee for the Carver Community Center’s talent shows. He took the job seriously, trying out material on the teenagers who hung out in the candy store across the street.
    One of his most memorable bits was his takeoff on the popular 1950s TV show Person to Person in which Edward R. Morrow interviewed celebrities while touring their opulent homes. Richard’s parody had Murrow interviewing a poor black southern sharecropper. Miss Whittaker recalled that he imitated both Murrow and sharecropper to perfection. “Mr. Murrow,” Richard-as-sharecropper would say, “this is my table and that there’s my chair. And that’s my chair and this is my table. Now the table lost a leg in ’44 and we put—oh, yassuh, the wall? We papered it with newspaper. Goes all the way back to 1914.”
    “I’ve never forgotten this routine,” Miss Whittaker said, “because just when you’d think he’d exhausted the possibilities of this chair, this table, and this newspaper, he would say something else. . . . No props. He was just showing it to us. And we were seeing it because he could do that.”
    In another bit, Richard mimed a scuba diver confronted by a shark. “It was so funny, the way he got out of the water, backing up from this shark,” she said. “It’s hard to show someone backing up, swimming, but Richard